by Barry Eisler
Manus nodded.
Anders sighed. “I appreciate . . . what you sometimes put up with.”
Another nod. But Anders sensed the loyalty behind it. The response to what might have been the only kindness this man had ever really known.
“When you’re back,” Anders went on, “I have something else for you. An employee about whom I have some . . . doubts. I want you to keep an eye on her.”
Manus frowned slightly, perhaps dubious. It wasn’t the type of task for which Anders ordinarily employed him.
“Her little boy is deaf,” Anders said. “It might provide an opening for you, a way in.”
The frown smoothed out. “All right.”
“Of course she’ll be monitored electronically, but she’s smart, she’ll be sensitive to that. I’m looking for something else.”
“What?”
Anders drummed his fingers along the desk. “I’m concerned what’s about to happen in Turkey might upset her. And I want to know . . . is she satisfied? Settled? Content? Or is her conscience troubling her? Is she a team player? Or is she starting to think of herself as an outsider? We learn a tremendous amount from SIGINT, yes, but there are people who forget the human aspect, the unquantifiable, the ghost in the machine. I don’t want to leave that out. I don’t want to leave anything out. Your firsthand impressions will be useful in that regard.”
For a moment, Manus looked at his huge hands, as though he might find some answer in them. Then he said, “You want to know everything.”
Anders only nodded. Didn’t everyone?
CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 4
Manus spent the entire flight to Istanbul in silence. Some of the time he slept; some of the time he reviewed the updates the director sent him; all of the time he ignored Delgado. The man’s smell was always unpleasant—a cologne Manus didn’t recognize from anywhere else, a too-strong floral soap, and some kind of hair gel, all combined with an underlying, slightly acrid odor that was uniquely Delgado’s. Delgado had once caught him wrinkling his nose, and asked what his problem was. Manus had told him he didn’t like Delgado’s cologne. Delgado had looked surprised—Manus had been standing almost twenty feet away—and had asked how Manus could smell it from all the way over there. Manus had merely shrugged. He had an unusually keen nose—lose one sense, and the others converge to pick up the slack—and he accepted that Delgado’s stink was one of the downsides.
He knew Delgado hated him, though he didn’t know why. He didn’t know why anyone ever hated him. People just sometimes did. The hate didn’t bother him. It was only a problem if it made someone try to hurt him. That was what he watched for. When he saw it coming, he would hurt the person first. He hoped that wouldn’t happen with Delgado. The director seemed to need Delgado, to value him, and Manus didn’t ever want to do anything bad to the director.
The part of his life that had happened before the director was vague to him now, dreamlike, disjointed. His father had been the first person to hurt him. Usually it happened when his father had been drinking. His father came from nothing in Granite City, Illinois, got a football scholarship to Ohio State, blew out a knee his first season, lost the scholarship, lost everything. Came back to Granite City to a job in the steel mill, knocked up a girl he knew from high school, married her. The baby had been Manus.
His father didn’t like Manus. He was too small. He was too quiet. He was stupid. Well, it was true Manus had been small; his size hadn’t kicked in until he was sixteen. And of course he was quiet. When his father drank, anything could set him off. So Manus learned not just to be quiet but to be still, to be like a table or a rug or a wall, when his father was in a hating mood. It didn’t always work, but he knew it wasn’t stupid. Quiet was smart. Quiet was survival.
When Manus was four, his father had hit him so hard in the head that Manus blacked out. When he’d awakened, he was in a hospital. His mother was sitting next to the bed, and her mouth had formed an enormous O of joy and relief when he’d opened his eyes and looked at her. He thought she had shouted, but he couldn’t hear her. In fact, everything was so quiet. It was as though he was under water.
People in white jackets did tests. He could hear a little, but only when people were talking very loudly directly in front of him. They told him his hearing might come back, that it was impossible to say. And that he had to be more careful near the stairs, because he had hurt himself falling down them. That seemed strange. He remembered his father yelling at him—in fact, his father yelling was the last thing he remembered hearing ever—but had he also fallen down the stairs? He wanted to ask, but it was hard to make himself understood. And anyway, what did it matter?
After that, his father didn’t drink for a long time, and he left Manus alone. A teacher came to the house and taught him and his mother something called American Sign Language. Manus liked it—a way to talk without making any sound. His mother worked hard to help him with it, but she also insisted that he watch her talk because most people didn’t know sign and he had to learn to read lips.
Manus went to the public school. It was hard. Some of the teachers remembered to face the class when they were talking so Manus, who always sat in front, could read their lips. But others didn’t remember, or didn’t care. There was a speech therapist who was nice, but Manus hated meeting with her. The drills she made him do were boring, and he didn’t understand the point. Why did he even need to talk? Early on, when the other kids made fun of him, he’d answered, and something about his voice only made them laugh harder. Silence was better. His mother told him he had to practice his speaking as much as he did lip-reading or he wouldn’t be able to make friends. But no one wanted to be friends with the deaf kid, the kid they called idiot and doofus and retard.
When he was ten, his father broke a hand at the mill and got something called disability. He started drinking again. And hurting Manus again. His mother tried to protect him, taking the hurt so he wouldn’t have to. Afterward, when his father was passed out, she would sign to Manus that it was all right, it hurt less than it seemed, less than seeing anything happen to her beautiful boy. He remembered she liked to call him that. And the smell of her perfume.
One night when Manus was fourteen, his father came home very drunk. Manus was doing homework at the kitchen table. His mother was cooking dinner, spaghetti and garlic bread, the sauce with mushrooms and sausage simmering in a big pot on the electric stove. Enough for lots of leftovers.
He could smell the alcohol the moment his father walked in. He looked up and watched his mother say, with a falsely cheery expression, that his father’s timing was great, the sauce was perfect now, it had been simmering all afternoon. His father said he wasn’t hungry. He looked around. Then he said the food stank. The whole place stank.
Manus thought the food smelled good. Spaghetti was his favorite. And his mother had worked hard to make dinner. For one tiny second, he forgot to be smart, to be a table or rug or wall. He glanced at his father. Only for that tiny second. But a second was enough.
“Don’t you fucking look at me like that!” his father had shouted, so loudly Manus could faintly hear it. “Who do you think puts the food on the table in this house? Who?”
It was bad when his father asked questions. Manus had learned there were no satisfactory answers. And once his father was asking questions, it was hard to be like furniture. Once his father had noticed you, not answering could make him feel like he was being ignored. Which he didn’t like. Manus didn’t know why. Manus preferred to be ignored.
So he did the best he could. He glanced down at the homework in front of him and kept very still.
“You look at me when I’m talking to you!” his father roared. He strode over to where Manus sat. “Look at me!”
His mother jumped between them. Manus craned his head to see her face. “He’s just doing his homework, Dom,” she’d said, her expression frightened. “How about some garlic bread?”
It was horrible when she intervened. Manus wa
s always grateful for it, relieved to have his father’s rage diverted. But with the relief came shame, more and more so as he was getting older. And suddenly, instead of feeling afraid, he felt something else. He felt . . . angry. Which instantly frightened him more. What if his father noticed? He had to be still, really still, like always. Until his father was tired and went away.
But his father was looking for something, and he’d found it in that tiny flash of anger. He shoved Manus’s mother out of the way and swatted Manus open-handed across the head, blasting him and the chair he sat in to the floor. Manus saw stars. He saw his mother scream, “Dom, stop!” Manus looked up and saw his father cuff his mother across the face, saw her stagger back into the wall with a boom he could feel through the floor. His father moving toward her, bellowing, his fists clenched. And the anger he’d felt flare a moment earlier—an anger he realized years later had been building and building beneath his efforts to suppress it—suddenly detonated.
He lurched to his feet and leaped onto his father’s back, yelling something, not words, just yelling. His father tore him off like a scab and shoved him two-handed so hard that Manus actually flew through the air and slammed into the wall next to the stove. He saw stars again. Things became fragmentary. His mother screaming, “You leave him alone!” His father advancing on him. His mother, yelling something, picking up a chair and raising it, stepping in and bringing the chair down hard on his father’s head. A loud crack. A shiver running through his father’s body. Then his eyes narrowing to slits, his head rotating like a reptile’s, the huge body swinging around behind it.
“You little cunt,” Manus had seen him say as he turned, and though he couldn’t hear it, it felt like a whisper, which was so much worse than any shouting, so much scarier. His mother tried to raise the chair again and his father snatched it from her hands like it was a child’s toy and flung it across the room, then grabbed the edge of the table and upended it out of the way. His mother was terrified now, Manus could see that; she was backpedaling, her eyes wide, her mouth aghast. His father moved in like a dog on a cornered squirrel. He grabbed the back of her neck with one hand and drove his fist into her face with the other. Blood burst from her nose and she staggered. His father grabbed her shoulders, not letting her fall, and smashed her backward into the wall, pulling her into him and then smashing her into the wall again, the back of her head slamming into the plaster and ricocheting off each time.
Everything seemed to slow down. Manus looked at the stove. The fat cook pot of spaghetti sauce, the bubbles rising through the viscous red amid mushrooms and chunks of meat. He felt hate blossom inside him. It was a supremely beautiful feeling, enormous and clean and focused.
He took hold of both handles of the pot and pulled it off the stove as he advanced on his father, aware the metal was burning his palms but hardly feeling it. “Hey!” he roared in a voice he had never used before, never imagined. A voice his father had never heard. It startled him. He released Manus’s mother’s shoulders, and as she slid to the floor, he started turning toward Manus, flinching as he did so, his head turtling in, his arms coming up, something in Manus’s new voice having reached past the drunkenness and warning a primitive, animal part of his mind of danger.
But too late. Manus was only a few feet away, and as his father’s head continued to come around, he flung the pot violently forward, keeping his grip on the handles so the pot stopped at the limit of his reach. An enormous red blob emerged like a dragon from its lair, seeming to float through the air as his father kept turning, turning toward him in slow motion . . .
The boiling sauce caught his father directly in the face and neck, smothering his features. He shrieked and collapsed to his knees, his body shaking, his hands clawing at his eyes. For a moment, Manus thought his father was wiping away mushrooms, and then realized what he was seeing instead was melting skin.
Manus ran past him and knelt next to his mother, who was lying on her back, her legs folded weirdly underneath her. Her eyes were open but rolled up in her head. He shook her and patted her cheek, whispering “Mommy, Mommy, wake up” again and again through a constricted throat. It had been Mom for years at that point, but his terror at her unresponsiveness was childlike and she was suddenly Mommy again.
He kept shaking her and patting her face. He could faintly hear his father howling, but soon there was no sound at all, and when he looked up, his father was lying still. He realized he should have called 911, how could he not have thought of that? He ran to the phone and dialed. He couldn’t hear if anyone picked up or what they were saying so he just kept repeating that he was deaf and needed help, his mother was hurt, please, he needed help.
An ambulance came. Police. Everyone went to the hospital. His mother was dead. Something called a subdural hematoma, a doctor explained. Bleeding inside the head. His father was unconscious. They bandaged his face like a mummy and doctors said he wouldn’t be able to see again even if he woke up. But he didn’t. He got pneumonia and died two weeks later.
The police brought in an interpreter who knew sign, and they asked Manus a lot of questions. He didn’t want to talk about it, but he told them the truth. Someone who called himself the district attorney explained that Manus wasn’t going to be prosecuted. But his grandparents didn’t want him. His deafness had always been a barrier between them, and now it was only worse—his father’s parents didn’t believe his story, while his mother’s wanted to know why he hadn’t done something sooner. Manus didn’t have an answer for that. He’d been too afraid, and look what had happened.
They put him in a special school. He got in a lot of fights. He had teeth knocked out, his nose was broken, he fractured knuckles. No matter what happened, he always learned. What parts of the body to hit with. What parts to hit. How to read people’s intentions, to know when it was coming and how. When to attack beforehand, when to attack back.
The other boys spit threats and cursed and shouted when they fought. But Manus never said anything, never made a sound. When someone was trying to hurt him, hurting them back came to feel like a job, just work to be done. The thing he found best was to get the other boy on the ground and then stomp his pelvis or face or neck as though he were crushing a can or breaking a log. But it was also good to bite, and attack the eyes. Even the toughest boys forgot everything except trying to get away when Manus dug a finger into an eye socket.
The people who administered the school made him take a lot of tests. They told him he was intelligent but that he was wasting it. He didn’t care. They told him if he didn’t stop fighting, they would have to send him to another special school, one “for boys like him.” But people kept trying to hurt him, and he kept going to work on them in return, so eventually they sent him to the other school, which was actually more like a prison.
One night during his first week there, he was awakened by a weight on his back. He tried to get up but couldn’t—someone was pinning him to his cot. He struggled and the somebody held something cold and sharp against his throat. He realized it was a knife. Two pairs of strong hands pulled at his pants. He knew what was happening and struggled, but the knife pressed harder. He froze. The hands stripped off his pants, then gripped his legs and spread them. He wondered why none of the other boys in the dorm were doing anything, then realized: they were just glad that this time it wasn’t them.
Three of them, and a knife—there was nothing he could do. So he relaxed. He wasn’t submitting. He was waiting. They were going to hurt him and he had to let them. Until he could go to work.
As his body relaxed, the one on top of him began to shake with laughter. The hands on his legs gripped less tightly.
It hurt. The boy who was doing it was trying to make it hurt, too. It wasn’t as bad as some of his father’s beatings, but it was worse, too, because it was inside him, inside his body. Manus gritted his teeth, tears spilling from his eyes, and waited.
The boy shuddered and Manus could feel him finishing. Manus hadn’t resisted. They were hold
ing him only loosely now, thinking he wouldn’t fight, thinking he just wanted it to be over.
The hands came off his legs. The knife started to come away from his throat.
He grabbed the blade with his left hand, his right hand seizing the wrist of the boy holding it. The edge cut deeply into his palm, but he didn’t let go. He thought the boy might have yelled, but he wasn’t sure and anyway it didn’t matter. Manus pushed hard on the blade and the leverage broke the boy’s grip. Manus grabbed the handle with his right hand. The boy tried to grab it back. Manus got his mouth around the boy’s thumb pad and bit down on the meat there.
The boy howled and tried to pull away. His hand came loose, something remaining in Manus’s mouth. Manus spat it out and twisted toward them. They tried to pin him, but he was slashing with the knife and they couldn’t get hold of him.
One of them had fallen to the floor and was getting to his knees. Manus stomped the back of his neck and flattened him. He stomped the same spot again and felt something shatter under his heel.
The second one started to run, but tripped over something in the weak light. Manus tried to grab the boy’s hair, but his hand was bleeding and the fingers wouldn’t close. He shoved the boy’s face onto the concrete floor and stabbed the knife into his neck. Blood erupted from the cut. The boy screamed and thrashed.
The third boy, the one who had hurt him, had made it to the locked dormitory door. He was pounding on it, screaming for someone to help. Manus moved in. The boy glanced back and saw him coming. Manus could see a guard through the thick glass in the center of the door, fumbling with his keys.
He didn’t know how long it took the guards to get inside. Long enough. Manus went to work on the boy. By the time the guards had used their batons and dragged Manus off, the boy’s face was mostly gone and he looked like a giant rag doll soaked in blood.
Two of the boys died. The one whose neck Manus had stomped lived, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs, and they sent him somewhere that knew how to take care of him. They made Manus take more tests. There was a hearing, and Manus was transferred to what they called the Special Ward. The boys there were scary, but there were no gangs like the one that had attacked him. And people heard about what he had done. Killing two boys and paralyzing a third inspired respect.